You are getting bad information. The Wikipedia pages on those specific topics (Ukraine, Gaza, BLM) is known to be have been manipulated by groups of editors acting in coordination to advance political narratives.
Is there a single source that is not manipulated on these topics? For example in Ukraine, it is very obvious that both western mainstream media and Russian mainstream media are little more than propaganda for their respective camps.
The good thing with Wikipedia (the English version in particular) is that both sides try to manipulate it, in addition to those who really want to say the truth, so in the end, it is relatively neutral. And if you want to go further, there are citations, which is maybe the most important aspect of Wikipedia compared to traditional media, including encyclopedias.
Wikipedia is not perfect, but it does its best to resist manipulation: citations, all activity is recorded and publicly available, etc...
Non-English Wikipedias have more bias, because they are smaller and also because unlike the English version that is used worldwide, even by non-English speakers, the non-English ones are often tied to specific countries. For example, I think I remember seeing the Arabic Wikipedia as being explicitly pro-Palestine, I guess the opposite is true for the Hebrew version.
Both sides try to manipulate it, but in certain topic areas, the numbers are highly skewed such that one side wins almost all disputes.
For example, Wikipedia's definition of Zionism was updated to include "as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible". There are absolutely no other dictionaries or encyclopedias with definitions resembling that; Wikipedia is uniquely biased there.
When you can't eliminate bias completely, as I think it is the case here, the next best thing is transparency, and you can hardly get better than that! Maybe no other dictionaries or encyclopedias describe it like that, but no other dictionaries or encyclopedias give so much detail on why it is described the way they do.
In the end "Zionism" is just a word, the meaning of it is what people make it to be, not what dictionaries or encyclopedias say it is, and considering the current situation, it means different things if you ask different people, so bias is unavoidable. Of course, if it is etymology you are after, the Wikipedia article covers that too, with plenty of citations.
I think you would have a point if such biased statements had tags such as [1], directing readers to the relevant discussions. Attempts to add such tags are normally reverted by the usual anti-Israeli editors.
So we have theoretical transparency, but no hint to the reader that they may want to look into a dispute rather than accepting the content at face value. Readers could peruse the talk page, but it contains several hundred (mostly archived) discussions.
The main page history also contains thousands of smaller disputes, where communication was done via edit summaries. Realistically, readers aren't going to dig through talk page archives, let alone years of edit history.
Yes, of course there are sources that aren’t actively manipulated by groups of activist editors whose goals are to obscure the truth. Have you tried ChatGPT?
This whole affair should get much more attention. If one topic on Wikipedia can be so manipulated, any topic on Wikipedia can, and it's no longer a reliable source of knowledge.
I hope The Wikimedia Foundation can get its act together, and I admire the courage of Jimmy Wales for speaking up about this, but I've also stopped donating. I want no part of this.
I also have stopped donating. I replied to a WM Foundation email explaining why and they said they don't have editorial control over wikipedia, i.e. their hands are tied. Well OK, but I'm not giving money to fund the promulgation of Jew hatred and blood libel. Sad state of affairs! I've given for years.
Yes, American media is anti-Israel, which is why we've seen daily accusations of genocide, forced starvation, and other absurd allegations for what was a totally normal war, much less destructive than the war in Iraq or Afghanistan or even Vietnam. /non-sarcastic
Another data point is that Jews are getting killed and assaulted around the world. With that said, I agree that for now there's no actual evidence supporting this allegation. But I wouldn't be totally shocked to learn that his ethnicity or zionist beliefs had something to do with this, if indeed he was Jewish (which hasn't been confirmed).
The problem is that most people have many parts of their identities and you don’t know which factored into the attack. It certainly wouldn’t be a shock if it was anti-Semitism but it’s unclear why he would have been singled out from the many thousands of other Jews in the Boston area.
This is problematic because most of the sources saying he was Jewish and pro-Israel seem to be quoting each other. The Wikipedia reference was added yesterday and removed today because the linked sources didn’t say anything about his religion, and I haven’t seen any sources about pro-Israel stances which I’d think would be easier to find if he was outspoken enough to be targeted. It’s still quite possible that he was the unfortunate victim of a stalker-most of the professors I know have had to work with security to keep someone off campus because colleges attract a certain brand of mentally ill people–but it seems odd that these sources are so confident about this assertion without citing sources.
Based on e.g. https://news.mit.edu/2018/nuno-loureiro-faculty-physics-1016 it really seems like his passion was physics and I think we should commemorate someone who tried to improve humanity’s understanding of the universe. If new details emerge, I’m sure they’ll be posted here.
There is no global hate movement against lefties that encourages and relishes in their pain. There is for Jews, who despite accounting for only 2% of the US population are victims of 69% of religious-based hate crimes. Doing the math, Jews are 35x more likely to be the victim of a hate crime. This is not true for lefties.
(This is a general statement responding to your analogy. As I mentioned in my earlier comment, I don't even know if this professor was Jewish or why he was killed.)
No, I don't. I include only FBI statistics of hate crimes targeting religious groups in the United States. Jews are 35x more likely to be victims of hate crimes in the US. Nothing to do with Gaza.
Some people refuse to acknowledge this reality and others attempt to justify it. Many resort to sarcasm as a defense mechanism, revealing their own biases in written records on major public forums.
First of all, that’s not true. Your statistic is probably based on one that indicates Jews account for 69% of religious-based hate crimes, while being 2% of the population. That’s about 35 times more likely if religious-motivated hate crimes were the only type of hate crime. But they’re not, so you’re just misrepresenting the data. The most generous stat you could use would be the one from 2023-2024, which has Jews as 16% of all hate crimes in the US, so an 8x multiplier. But this was a dramatic uptick, which came along with the genocide being committed in their name.
Also, there is a massively asymmetric application of hate crime laws, as you can clearly see by the automatic “hate crime” conclusion you’re already seeing here simply because the victim was Jewish. This asymmetry is glaringly obvious when you look at the handling of these two stabbings.
In one case, the perpetrator stabbed a white woman to death, and said on camera "got the white bitch." In the other case, the subway stabbing happened "blocks from" a synagogue following an argument. Which one do you think gets the hate crime treatment?
This asymmetry makes it impossible to gain much insight from the statistics on this. It’s very likely that 8x is a very high upper bound, and only in an exceptional year where those stats coincided with a genocide committed in their name, which has been a cause for global outrage and disgust.
You’re not “correcting” me. You’re swapping denominators and then accusing me of misrepresentation.
The ~69% figure is not “probably based on” anything. It’s directly from the FBI’s 2023 hate crime data as summarized by DOJ: 2,699 religion-based incidents, 1,832 anti-Jewish. That is 1,832 / 2,699 = 67.9% (call it ~68–69%).
Source: https://www.justice.gov/crs/news/2023-hate-crime-statistics
Now you try to “debunk” that by quietly switching the denominator to all hate crimes. Fine. Do that math too: 1,832 / 11,862 total incidents = 15.4% of all reported hate crime incidents in 2023. For a ~2% population, that’s still about 7–8x disproportionate. So no, it’s not “not true.” You’re just changing the question and hoping nobody notices. You even implicitly concede the underlying statistic (“69% of religion-based hate crimes”) and then pretend it’s false by changing denominators mid-argument.
Your “only if religion-based hate crimes were the only type” line is nonsense. I explicitly restricted the claim to religion-based incidents, and the DOJ/FBI table does the same. You’re arguing with a strawman you invented.
As for “overreported” and “asymmetric” enforcement: that’s vibes plus two cherry-picked links about a specific incident. If you think the FBI/DOJ figures are inflated, show a dataset and a method, not anecdotes and insinuation.
Also, plenty of incidents never get reported at all. I’ve personally been assaulted for being Jewish and didn’t report it. That is what undercount looks like in real life.
Finally, please stop misrepresenting what I wrote. I explicitly said “religion-based hate crimes.” Your comment only makes sense if you pretend I didn’t.
Switched the denominator? So you were specifically talking about religious-based hate crimes? Why were you talking about that very specific subset, and why wouldn’t you mention that or imply it anywhere in your comment? You wouldn’t be… a liar, would you?
Also, nice AI slop - I stopped reading at the first angle quotes.
You’re accusing me of “not mentioning the subset” while quoting a thread where I literally wrote “religious-based hate crimes.” So either you missed it or you’re pretending you missed it. But it's here in this exact thread for anyone to see. Permalink: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46304753
If you want to change the denominator to “all hate crimes,” say so up front. That gives 15.4% of all incidents, still massively disproportionate.
It's common to use angle quotes on HN, but either way, you accusing me of "AI slop" because you don't like the way I quote things doesn't change the arithmetic and is not a rebuttal.
I see it now, you said that in a different comment which wasn’t the one I replied to. My bad for not noticing.
Still, restricting it to “religious-based” hate crimes is transparently misleading. Using a statistic from a narrow category to imply a claim about the whole is a classic substitution error. Either you are lacking in statistical literacy, or you are being intentionally misleading.
And let’s not forget the massive, undeniable asymmetry here that makes the entire point meaningless. None of this is sufficient to assume that a crime against a Jew is automatically a hate crime until proven otherwise.
Thanks for the correction, I appreciate you owning it.
But the rest is just another goalpost move. Quoting a clearly labeled subset is not “transparently misleading,” as you put it It’s how statistics work. I said “religious-based hate crimes” explicitly, because we were discussing hostility toward Jews. The DOJ/FBI table is explicit: 2023 had 2,699 religion-based hate crime incidents; 1,832 were anti‑Jewish.
And I already gave the “whole” denominator too: those same 1,832 incidents are 15.4% of all 11,862 hate crime incidents in 2023. For a 2% population, that is still ~7–8x disproportionate, as I've mentioned. So the “substitution error” accusation doesn’t apply here, because I didn’t imply 69% of all hate crimes. I stated the subset and then did the math for the broader denominator as well.
On the “asymmetry makes it meaningless” claim: I see you're asserting that, but you haven’t demonstrated it. FBI hate crime data is not “crime against a Jew = hate crime until proven otherwise.” It’s incidents agencies specifically classify as bias-motivated based on evidence. The well-known problem in this space is underreporting and incomplete reporting, not some magical inflation that conveniently zeros out anti‑Jewish bias. I can attest to the underreporting having not reported an assault where I was beat up on the NYC subway and told "they should have burned you all" while minding my own business on an NYC subway.
Finally, none of this was me calling any specific crime a hate crime. I explicitly said we don’t know the motive in the professor’s case. This thread started because you challenged a statistical claim. The numbers stand. Given you opened with "liar" and "AI slop," you might want to recalibrate before accusing others of ‘statistical illiteracy'.
Using a religion-specific hate-crime metric to argue about hate crimes in general is not valid inference. It’s a case of category substitution amplified by base-rate neglect, and is misleading even if every quoted number is technically true.
You’re still arguing with a sentence I did not write.
I did not use a “religion-specific metric to argue about hate crimes in general.” I said, explicitly, “69% of religious-based hate crimes.” Then, when you insisted on the “general” denominator, I gave that too: anti‑Jewish incidents are 15.4% of all hate crime incidents in 2023, still ~7–8x disproportionate for a ~2% population. Both numbers come from the same DOJ/FBI table.
https://www.justice.gov/crs/news/2023-hate-crime-statistics
So the “category substitution / base-rate neglect” lecture is just a rhetorical reset button. You keep pretending I implied “69% of all hate crimes” because that’s the only way your critique has a target.
At this point the pattern is clear:
1) miss what I actually wrote,
2) accuse me of lying/AI,
3) admit you missed it,
4) reframe anyway by inventing a broader claim I never made,
5) argue against your invention.
I’m not doing more laps of that. If you want to dispute the DOJ/FBI numbers or show actual evidence of systematic inflation, present a dataset and method. Otherwise we’re done here.
Contrary to the consensus opinion, losing a war one started is not genocide. For any doubts you can use comparables for civilian deaths in various theatres of war throughout history.
He's saying Hamas lost a war, that's all that happened. You're making an unrelated point, which is that genocide is often carried out in the context of war. That may be true, but that doesn't make the hoax that Israel's war against Hamas was a genocide any less false.
Israel's war against Hamas was not a genocide. (Nor was it a distinct war, but merely part of the much longer war against the Palestinian people.)
Israel's war against Hamas was part of a campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people that has been conducted through much of that longer war, a campaign that it started decades before Hamas existed (and fostered the creation of Hamas, during the more intense period of its occupation of Gaza, as a tactic to facilitate through both dividing its opposition and making it less internationally sympathetic, as the primary constraint on the campaign has always been international, and particular US, tolerance.)
Of course it's not and never was a genocide. But jimbo808 wishes it were, because he thinks that will help him justify the very rise in hate crimes against Jews that he also tries to downplay.
jimbo808 wrote: "The most generous stat you could use would be the one from 2023-2024, which has Jews as 16%... which came along with the genocide being committed in their name."
What kind of worldview motivates such a comment? He invents a genocide and says it's being committed in the name of American Jews? This is a novel claim even by the low standards of the antizionist crowd. Laughable.
I, like roughly 90% of the world's jews, am a zionist and I care about civilian casualties. In fact, I don't know a single zionist who doesn't care about civilian casualties. You just made up this racist nonsense, and your comment is totally inappropriate for HN.
What is true is that I'd deny allegations about civilian casualties that I think are false, but that would be because I think they're false, nothing to do with zionism.
Sure you do. Just like MAGA voters who are suffering from the decisions from their vote "didn't vote for this". Except you explicitly did. Zionism necessarily removes land and homes from people to carve out a "safe space" for Jews without any consideration for the generations you're fucking over. Just like you conveniently ignore the decades of "settlers" taking over other people's land. Just like you ignore the destruction of Palestinian wells and hospitals. Just like you ignore the rape of prisoners and the celebration among Zionists for it. It's a nasty belief system that puts Jews above other humans. It is explicitly bigoted and xenophobic and it is proudly announced and broadcast throughout Israeli society.
> A member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, speaking Monday at a meeting of lawmakers, justified the rape and abuse of Palestinian prisoners, shouting angrily at colleagues questioning the alleged behavior that anything was legitimate to do to "terrorists" in custody.
> Lawmaker Hanoch Milwidsky was asked as he defended the alleged abuse whether it was legitimate, "to insert a stick into a person's rectum?"
> "Yes!" he shouted in reply to his fellow parliamentarian. "If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!"
That is what you are defending. It's fucking disgusting.
The ICJ has not said Israel's response is a genocide - not in Lebanon, which is what this thread is about, nor in Gaza.
“…the court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide and that South Africa had the right to present that claim… it did not decide — and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media — it didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.” - ICJ head President Donoghue
Premise 2 is false. The vast majority of the injured were Hezbollah terrorists. You say The Times of Israel reported "many of the injured were civilians, including children, women, and non-combatant" - show me a source, please.
It's also false that footage shows numerous injured civilians with bandaged hands and faces. Again, show a credible source and explain how this happened to them.
Cmon man, there are sources pasted all over this thread from my discussion with OP. I'm not going to post the same source that was already discussed with him, why would I waste my time to do so?
OP did split this chain, but a sibling comment has the sources you want.
EDIT: Getting downvoted because I didn't want to paste the same source N times. Nice.
Perhaps it's worth considering an algorithmic review of flagging abuse. You can feed a table of flagged comments with the user, the comment the user flagged, and the context, as well as HN's rules, into GPT or a similar AI to get a first approximation of which users are abusing flagging, and on which topics flagging is most abused. I bet you'd find some interesting data!
If any other country handed out explosive pagers to terrorists and had them blow up in their faces and balls we'd consider it terrorism? Really? I thought terrorism was targeting civilians. Are you arguing that Hezbollah's top brass were civilians?
So the indiscriminate mass detonation of explosive devices is not terrorism? Are you aware of how many civilian casualties there were as a result of this attack? Would this be acceptable if Hezbollah did this to Israeli military officers?
The attack was by definition discriminate. I don't think there's an attack in modern history that was more targeted and had less collateral damage. The attack targeted hundreds Hezbollah leaders, who bought and used those pagers. There was minimal collateral damage among civilians amounting to unverified allegations that a child of a Hezbollah member was maimed, and some minor other damage. The explosives in the pagers were measured in grams, and the explosions were relatively small, specifically to minimize collateral damage.
It was indiscriminate in timing, location, and device possession.
Unless you’re saying that the country behind a self-evaluated >80% civilian to combatant kill ratio in Gaza went through rigorous protocols to minimize harm in this attack?
The timing was during a war, the location was in a belligerent country, and the pagers were only and exclusively given to hezbollah leadership. The very definition of discriminate.
Also, Israel has not "self-evaluated" a >80% civilian to combatant kill ratio. There was a Haaretz report that said the IDF was able to ID about 20% of those killed as militants against known databases, which is remarkably high compared to any other war. That doesn't mean the remaining 80% are civilians, it just means they weren't ID'd against a databse. So this includes anyone with a gun at a distance. Do you think Ukraine has a database of Russian soldiers and are able to ID 20% of the russian soldiers they kill against that database? Of course not. Israel's self evaluation of the ratio varies between 1.4:1 and 2:1 depending on the government official you quote.
Re: timing - They were triggered to explode en masse, which implies that there was zero consideration to minimizing civilian harm.
Re: location - They exploded everywhere you can think of, while these targets were doing civilian activities near other civilians, and not in a combat setting.
Re: possession - Given the above, and Israel’s horrendous kill ratio, there was definitely no consideration for possession of these pagers at the time of the attack. For example, who is to say that some pagers weren’t in use by members of the political bureau, or unofficially resold to a hospital for use by oncall doctors?
> Re: timing - They were triggered to explode en masse, which implies that there was zero consideration to minimizing civilian harm.
Zero? The whole nature of the attack shows consideration towards "minimizing civilian harm." Tricking an enemy agent into carrying a small explosive device on his person, then detonating it, will have far less civilian harm than the standard procedure of dropping a bomb on whatever building they happen to be in.
Your thinking appears unreasonably binary here, as shown by your use of phrases like "zero consideration" and "definitely no consideration," in reaction to Israel not meeting an unrealistically high standard for "minimizing civilian harm." Could Israel have done more to minimize civilian harm with that attack? Perhaps, but that doesn't mean they did nothing.
@Cyph0n, if you think Israel's approach led to too much collateral damage, why don't you propose a solution that would have led to less collateral damage while still taking the Hezbollah leaders out of action?
I bet you won't do this, because I think we can ultimately agree it wasn't possible for Israel to take all these men out of action simultaneously and minimize collateral damage much beyond what it did.
I think where we disagree is that you think Israel should not have taken these men out of action.
Nice deflection. All I need to care about as a lowly SWE is that this attack injured thousands of Lebanese civilians. This is the real world, not a movie or simulated war game.
And I would wager that you would immediately condemn such a barbaric attack if the sides were reversed.
So you weren't able to propose a solution that would have led to less collateral damage because no such solution exists. You know it. I know it. Everyone reading this knows it.
Instead of answering directly you make a comment about deflection, and insist an obvious falsehood (the attack injured thousands of Lebanese civilians) is all you care to believe. On this, we agree. It's all you care to believe, the evidence be damned!
timing - The fact that they were triggered to explode en masse does not imply there was zero consideration to minimizing civilian harm. However, the fact that only Hezbollah leaders had these pagers, and the fact that the explosives were small, does imply there was deep consideration to minimizing civilian harm.
location - they all exploded on the person of hezbolllah leaders or in their possession in a belligerent country during wartime
possession - Israel has a laudable and low civilian: militant kill ratio, possibly the best in the history of modern combat. The pagers were encrypted military devices with military messages, there was no known use by doctors or non Hezbollah operatives.
This is what you call "well-documented"? Did you even read the article?
This 1972 article cites unsubstantiated claims from memoirs written decades after the fact — not verified evidence. There is no solid historical documentation that Israel, the Israeli government, or even Lehi sent functional bombs to U.S. leadership in 1947. The only sources are anecdotal, inconsistent, and disputed.
Crucially, there are no Secret Service or National Archives records of any assassination attempt on Truman by Zionist militants. A Freedom of Information Act request for such records produced nothing. Historians who have looked into the claim find no contemporaneous evidence and no confirmation in government archives.
In other words, this is not a "documented Israeli attack on the U.S." Instead, it’s a story that survives (in spite of evidence that it's false) in the minds and narratives of people like you want it to be true. That’s how conspiracy theories work: weak evidence, strong emotion.
Ok, so I see you're taking a denialist approach. At best you will have to settle on "well they sure did send them to a bunch of British politicians, and ya know, they did carry out the King David Hotel bombing that killed 91 people via terrorism, and they did plan on terrorist bombing a bunch of Westerners and Arabs to blame it on communists and Muslim Brotherhood (the Lavon Affair) before getting caught, but they definitely didn't send them to Truman we pinky promise".
This isn't even the most outrageous thing Lehi and Irgun did (trying to partner with Hitler against the British might take that) before the Israeli government disbanded them and merged most of them into the IDF when they no longer needed to terrorize the West.
Correct. I am taking a denialist approach toward an absurd conspiracy theory that has been thoroughly debunked.
What you’re doing instead is substituting facts for relevance. You went from a false claim (“Israel mailed bombs to Truman”) to a pile-on of unrelated historical violence, as if proving Jews committed any political violence somehow rescues your earlier claim for which there is zero evidence. It doesn’t.
On the facts:
– Irgun carried out the King David Hotel bombing against a building housing British military command, intelligence, police, and civil administration. Civilian staff were killed. That qualifies as terrorism by modern definitions. I’m not defending it.
– Lehi was a tiny, radical splinter group widely condemned at the time, including by mainstream Jewish leadership.
– In 1941, Lehi produced one fringe document proposing that a future Jewish state and Germany shared a common enemy in Britain. The proposal was ignored. There was no alliance, no cooperation, no operational contact. Calling this “trying to partner with Hitler” is dishonest.
None of this provides evidence that Israel, any Zionist organization, or any Jewish group attempted to assassinate a U.S. president. The fact that some groups committed real crimes does not magically make the crimes you invented true.
Conflating Irgun with Lehi, anti-British insurgency with “terrorizing the West,” and an ignored memo with Nazi collaboration isn’t history, it's you polemicizing.
This reminds me of other 20th century atrocity denial I read online. There is adequate evidence of the Truman bombing attempt.
Regarding Lehi and Irgun, they were small because terrorist cells usually are. They operated with the permission of the government (evidence by the government ultimately demonstrating this when it dissolved them and incorporated many of them into itself), and involved people celebrated today in Israel for their terrorism, including future PMs of Israel. It is entirely accurate to say that the terrorist organizations Irgun and Lehi represent the nature and spirit of the Israeli people today in a pure and honest form. And I doubt many over there would disagree with you, as long as you're speaking Hebrew lol
The “20th century atrocity denial” comparison is disgusting and transparent. Holocaust denial is rejected because it contradicts a mountain of primary evidence. You are doing the opposite. You are trying to manufacture certainty where the documentation is missing, then calling anyone who asks for records a “denialist.”
On the Truman claim, you keep saying “adequate evidence” while producing none. The best you have is a biography by Truman’s daughter decades later that does not cite sources and newspaper blurbs repeating those claims. That is not “well documented.” That is the stuff of conspiracy theory.
Here is what you still have not provided: a contemporaneous Secret Service report, a White House mail log entry, an FBI memo, a case number, a preserved device, photographs, lab notes, arrests, indictments, or any archival file tying an actual bomb to Lehi. In fact, a FOIA request to the Secret Service for records of this alleged incident came back “no responsive documents,” and the Truman Library reports it has nothing and explicitly notes that Margaret Truman’s biographies rarely cite sources.
So no, you do not get to say “adequate evidence” and then hide behind moral outrage.
Your next move is equally sloppy. “They operated with the permission of the government.” In 1947 there was no Israeli government. When the state did exist, it disbanded Lehi, arrested members, and fought Irgun in the Altalena affair.
If you have a primary document tying a Truman mail bomb to Lehi, post it. If you do not, drop the Holocaust baiting and admit you are repeating an allegation you cannot substantiate.
And your finale, that Irgun and Lehi represent “the nature and spirit of the Israeli people today,” is just collectivist bigotry. “Terror cells are usually small,” you say, and then you claim two fringe militias somehow define millions of Israelis. That is not analysis. It is an ethnic smear.
“Obviously” is a nice rewrite, but you did not say Holodomor. Holodomor or Holocaust, the move is the same: you are trying to smear “denialism” over a claim you cannot document. Denialism is rejecting mountains of primary evidence. I am asking you for primary evidence and you have produced none. Post a contemporaneous Secret Service or FBI record tying a Truman bomb to Lehi, or admit you are repeating hearsay. Either way, I appreciate you providing a written record of your conspiracy theories and holocaust bating here on Hacker News.
If you know history, it's quite obvious. The Holodomor is an alleged genocide with no absolute evidence that it was planned and intentional, just a great deal of credible hearsay and correlating patterns of behavior. Much like there's no reason to think the allegation made that Israel was sending a mailbomb to Truman was false given all the other Western politicians they were mailbombing at that time.
Thanks for finally stating your epistemic standard out loud: “credible hearsay and correlating patterns” is enough for you to accuse Jews of trying to assassinate a U.S. president. That is not “knowing history.” That is how conspiracy theories work. "Quite obvious" and "no reason to think false" don’t count as proof. You started with a claim you probably genuinely believed in, realized there was no evidence for it, and instead of admitting to that, reverted to trolling. That's bad faith discussion and against HN rules. I’m not playing “atrocity analogy” whack-a-mole as you pivot to minimizing the Holodomor to cover for a claim you cannot document. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence.
I didn't accuse "Jews" of trying to assassinate a US president, I accused Israel of doing so.
>You started with a claim you probably genuinely believed in, realized there was no evidence for it, and instead of admitting to that, reverted to trolling.
I still believe it, as the claim was from Margaret Truman Daniel, who had first hand knowledge of what happened to her parents. You clearly don't agree, despite Israel having done the same thing at the same time to other Western politicians. There's no "trolling" or violation of "HN rules" going on, other than perhaps the antisemitic conflation of Jewishness with Israel, particularly when it comes to who is blamed for the terrorism committed by the latter. It is a form of ethnoracial essentialism and bigotry that also impacts Muslims in the US and other ethnic and racial groups (such as the targeting of Chinese citizens in Indonesia as a form of blame for the country of China's actions).
Nice dodge, but switching from “Jews” to “Israel” does not make you more precise. It makes you chronologically wrong. Israel did not exist in 1947.
And the sermon about “conflating Jewishness with Israel” is rich coming from the person who already declared that Irgun and Lehi represent “the nature and spirit of the Israeli people today.” You do not get to smear an entire people, then clutch pearls about conflation when the smear gets noticed.
Also, Margaret Truman Daniel is not “first-hand evidence” of a 1947 mail bomb plot. First-hand evidence would be a Secret Service or FBI file with a case number, a White House mailroom log, the device itself, lab reports, arrests, indictments, or any archival record from the time tying a specific package to a specific group. You have produced none. A biography written decades later, with no citations, is hearsay until it is anchored to contemporaneous documentation.
“No reason to think it was false” is not how history works. Post a primary document or retract the claim. Everything else here, including your sophomoric word games, is noise.
Doing the pushes up glasses "Ahem well ackshully it was Mandatory Palestine" shtick doesn't really give your terrorism apologia narrative any more legitimacy.
>First-hand evidence would be a Secret Service or FBI file with a case number, a White House mailroom log, the device itself, lab reports, arrests, indictments, or any archival record from the time tying a specific package to a specific group
Which would certainly be classified.
Frankly, this is all just a diversion. Classic Z tactic. I really don't care if someone believes that (the future) Israel's paramilitary terrorists, out of their extensive mailbombing campaign against Western politicians, did or didn't target one specific person. It's really tangential to my point that Israel is a terror state that was born of a campaign of death and atrocities against not only the original inhabitants of the land they stole, but also against Western victims whose only crime was not helping the genocidal Zionist project enthusiastically enough.
This is you admitting you were never discussing history in good faith. You started with “adequate evidence of the Truman bombing attempt.” When asked for records, you pivoted to “it would certainly be classified.” Now you say you “don’t really care” whether it happened. That is not an argument. That is a bluff collapsing in real time.
Your “pushes up glasses, Mandatory Palestine” sneer is also a self-own. You accused “Israel” of an act in 1947. Israel did not exist in 1947. Correcting the actor and the date is not “apologia.” It is basic competence. And I literally called the King David Hotel bombing terrorism and said I’m not defending it, so your “terrorism apologia narrative” is just you lying about what I wrote.
The “classified” excuse is especially weak because this has been FOIA’d. The Secret Service response that’s publicly posted comes back “no responsive records.” Agencies do not answer “we found nothing” when they are sitting on a neat classified case file that exists. They either locate records and exempt them, or they Glomar. “No records” is what it says on the tin.
Then you retreat into “Classic Z tactic,” which is just coded insinuation for “I can’t support my factual claim, so I’ll smear you as part of a tribe.” You do not get to throw that kind of ethnic shorthand around and then pretend you are the one worried about “conflation.”
Bottom line: you used an unverified rumor to call me a denialist. When challenged, you switched to “classified.” When cornered, you admitted you don’t care if it’s true. That tells everyone exactly what this was.
… and it’s not just that Israel woke up one morning and decided to take Hezbollah to the cleaners, either. Hezbollah started a military campaign against Israel on October 8th, 2023, one day after the most horrific attack Jews have experienced since the holocaust.
I don’t think this attack could have been more moral or justified than it was. It didn’t even kill on large numbers, instead it was just enough to neutralize Hezbollahs command and control structures.
Hi @dang. Here is a factual comment of mine that does not break the rules which, along with many other comments on one side of the Israel/Palestine issue, was unnecessarily and unjustifiably flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45832233
@dang Here is another comment of mine on this thread that is substantive, responding directly to the issue, and not a personal attack, but was still flagged. I'm an HN user for 15 years, have reviewed the rules, and don't think this violates any (except that I used the word "balls"?). I agree with the other commenters that flagging is being abused here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223274
reply